What makes a child intelligent? The age old debate rages on, with some insisting that intelligence is an innate, genetic thing linked to your parental inheritance and others insisting that it is more to do with the environment you are brought up in and the type of life you are exposed to that fosters intelligence. Some call this debate ‘nature vs. nurture’ and for many, wellness is linked to feeling confident in their child’s intelligence and academic ability.
Research from a toy university in New York, the University of Rochester, however, looks set to throw another theory onto the table, blowing the debate wide open again. There is now a theory that intelligence is linked solely to the size and shape of a child’s brain. This is not to exclude factors such as genetics, nurture and wellbeing, but it throws a different slant on the issue. This was taken from a study where a group of researchers looked at developing brains in children and adults and found that children whose brains looked and behaved similarly to adult brains were more likely to develop into highly intelligent adults.
A small group of 27 children was identified for the purposes of the study and all of the children in this group were aged between four and 11 years old. Brains scans on each of the participants in the study were carried out while they watched an episode of popular children’s educational programme Sesame Street, and scans were also done on 20 adults for comparison purposes. The researchers found that the children whose brains looked and acted in a similar way to the adult brains during the scans were also capable of achieving higher marks on maths and verbal tests. This is ground breaking new information, which may help in the future to look at brain development and to delve further into understanding health concerns associated with the brain.
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